0:05  
All right. We are live and back on the main stage after I figured out how to use the platform correctly, there is a chance that I might have kicked out our American Sign Language person. So we're just going to keep this broadcast on the entire time. And just stick with it. So Mallory Hello.

0:27  
Hi. Thank you for having me. Good morning over here.

0:31  
Yeah, yeah. Oh, and Julia Campbell says hello to if you want to go ahead and start to share your screen. If the interpreter does end up joining us apologies, folks, that is my bad. That's going to be great. It will ensure that we have captions going on for accessibility no matter what. And then I'm going to get to work to make sure that the rest of the stage is good to go for the rest of the day. So Mallory, go ahead in you should be able to or I can go ahead and add this to the stream. And I want to welcome you to the main stage of generosity xchange last year, you were our top rated session. So welcome back.

1:16  
Oh, thank you so much. And that's a lot of pressure to put on me. But I hope to to meet the bar that you've set here. And I'm just so honored and grateful to be back. And I love this gathering and everything that you do to put on this event. So I'm really grateful for you.

1:32  
Well, I don't I I've already wasted a few minutes of yours. So I'm going to hand it over to you, I'm going to start to work on making sure that there's no further interruptions for our speakers and our American Sign Language interpretation. So Mallory, welcome to the main stage of generosity xchange, I'll pop back in near the end.

1:49  
Awesome. Thank you, Tim. Hello, everyone. If I have not met you before, I want to introduce myself. My name is Mallory Erickson. I am the creator of the power partners formula host of the podcast what the fundraising. I'm an executive coach and fundraising consultant. And I'm also trained in habit and behavior design. And so we're going to be talking about all those pieces together today. And if you aren't familiar with my story, I talked about this a lot. I became an accidental fundraiser in the sector when I started to get promoted up through the ranks and found myself first in a managing director role and then a an executive director role. And it came with big fundraising responsibilities. And I absolutely hated fundraising. So I shared this photo a lot. But this is really the reality. As I was building this nonprofit, I was putting up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together. And you can tell me in the chat if this resonates with you, right Impact Report fake trying to show that we had everything together, Everything was running smoothly. But the truth was, was that I was running myself ragged, I was working 12 to 15 hour days, sometimes I didn't have a donor pipeline that I trusted, I was choosing my organization over my family, my friends, my health, I even developed chronic pain in my neck. And I was really miserable. And I felt really alone. And I had this moment where I was like, I think I might need to leave the nonprofit sector, I can't figure out how I can make this fundraising thing work for me. And so what ended up happening is that I went back and I got executive coach certified. It wasn't connected to my fundraising at the time. But I got trained in habit and behavior design got executive coach certified, trained in design thinking. And those frameworks really came together and allowed me to take a big step back and say, I actually think there's a totally different way for us to fundraise. So that is what led me ultimately to create my signature course, which is called the power partners formula. And everything that we're talking about today is really inspired by that course, and inspired by the fusion of Executive Coaching Habit and behavior design and the best fundraising strategy. So for those of you that love an agenda, I just want to walk through what we are going to be covering today. So we're going to talk about the importance of donor insights. You know, the topic of this talk is from fundraiser action to donor behavior. So I'm going to take us a step back and talk about the importance of donor insights. And then really understanding the truth about donor behavior, designing for donors to take action, I'm gonna teach you how to do that in general. And then I'm going to give you my top three high impact fundraiser behaviors that I want you to start integrating into your daily life right now. And many of these are very uncommon, so they have huge fundraising impacts. And I think you're gonna be really excited to learn more about each of them. And then at the very end, because I just couldn't help myself, I'm adding one more little tip and resource around motivation in particular, so we'll get to that at the end. But so all of you guys are here at NEON ones generosity exchange. So many of you know or should know that neon produced this amazing report earlier this year on understanding the future of individual giving And in it are some incredible insights around donor behavior. And I'm sure someone can drop the link for those of you who might not have a chance who might have not had a chance to read this yet. But insights around donor behavior are critical part of understanding the philanthropic landscape like for one, here's this example from the from Neon's report about the sequence of volunteering and donating. So I love this data, because it shows that it's important to offer volunteer opportunities to your current donors, and invite your current volunteers to give because folks want to do both, right, this data is really helpful. But sometimes when we look at donor data, things get a little bit scary. And my concern is that it starts to lead to some limiting beliefs that end up holding us back from taking the actions that we that could ultimately shift that data. But instead, we start to behave in a way that proves our fear to be true. So this graph is showing the declining donor retention numbers, right. This is also from neons report. But here's the thing, you guys, we control this. And I want to be clear, I'm not out here saying like our behavior is responsible for the declining numbers and blah, blah, blah, in a way that really increases your stress. I'm talking about this from the potential from the perspective of there is so much potential in understanding that we have more control and influence than we think. Because we also control this. So here's another here's another image from neon's donor report. Why is everyone giving in December, right? We have a lot of narratives around the fact that the holidays make people more generous. But I actually don't even believe that we know our donors want to give at end of year are that the majority of our donors want to give it end of year? Sure some might. But at this level, I don't think so. I actually think the reality is that we ask at end of year, fundraising is a self fulfilling prophecy. So I interviewed on my podcast what the fundraising Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, she wrote the book, how emotions are made. And she really helped us understand that we actually predict our reality into existence. So let me give you an example. And if you've seen this party trick before, please do not spoil it for everyone. Okay. But I want to just start by showing you this image. And I don't know how if there's a delay in the chat, but just tell me what you see, right? If you haven't done this before, you're probably seeing a bunch of black and white blobs. And that's because of something called experiential blindness.

7:31  
But I just cured you of experiential blindness. It's a snake, right? But here's actually the best part. Who here can still see the snake? Okay, so why is this happening? And what on earth does this have to do with your fundraising? Right? The short answer for why you can still see the snake is that we don't experience the world directly, we experience our mental simulation of it. And without a concept or context for something, we can't incorporate it into our simulation. But once we do have context or belief, our brain starts to prick predict that concept everywhere. Donor behavior is a response. So anytime we're looking at donor insights, we're looking at how much we raise whether or not that donor gave donors behavior is a response. It happens because they were prompted or not prompted. And what impacts whether or not they were prompted is the fundraisers behavior, and what impacts the fundraisers behavior is fundraiser psychology. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about that today. Because I can tell you all the behaviors for you to do. But if I don't explain what's actually happening in your head in your brain body connection, then we're going to leave this and you're not going to implement everything that I suggest, because of all these really natural tricks that our brain plays on us. So let's talk about this for a second. So we have to understand what's happening in our brains and bodies to understand our own behavior, right, and ultimately, how we feel. So this is something called the cognitive behavior loop, I bring it into everything that I do, because at the root of everything, every strategy that I give you, every tool that I give you, your ability to actually implement that tool is directly impacted by this. So this is the idea that our thoughts and our beliefs inform how we feel, and then ultimately what we do, right. And then what we do impacts our results. So anytime I'm not getting a result that I want. I look at the actions that I'm taking, but I also look at how I feel about those actions, right. Not all fundraising emails are created equal. Not all phone calls are created equal and our energy around how we're doing those certain actions is really impacted by how we see Though if we feel like we're hounding someone to give us money, and we're trying to, you know, we feel really guilty about the fact that we're emailing them again, and we feel super uncomfortable, that is going to impact how we show up and the energy that we bring to a situation. And it's going to directly impact our results. And that is deeply rooted and the thoughts and the beliefs that we hold about money, about fundraising, about value about our organization, and these things have to be examined. And if you're like, Whoa, Mallory, this a big can of worms, you just asked me to look at my own thoughts and beliefs. The number one step is really just to bring some awareness around it to just start to notice, Oh, I feel a little bit uncomfortable. I'm supposed to press send on this email. I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable right now, what are some of the underlying thoughts and beliefs that might be leading to that discomfort? Or have you ever noticed those tasks on your to do list that are really like 10-15 minute tasks, but they just keep sitting there week after week after week? Usually, it's tied to something like this. It's not a time thing, right? It's that there's some fear, there's some discomfort, there's some resistance that's coming up rooted in the thoughts and the beliefs that you're holding behind the action. So get curious start to just bring some awareness to that. This is one of the ways that I talk about I talk about this a lot with fundraisers, there is so much noise in our sector about new strategies. But the reality is that only a fraction of those strategies are actually being realized. Right, we say it's because we don't have enough time. And that's a bit of the issue. Don't get me wrong, nonprofit leaders and fundraisers are stretched way too thin, you are wearing way too many hats, you have way too much on your plate. But or, and there's also the reality that our beliefs are holding us back from taking the most effective action from prioritizing our work in a way that is going to lead to the highest return on investment. And until we bring some awareness to what's happening in our brain, and that brain body connection, we're going to continue to hold ourselves back from realizing the fundraising results that we're truly capable of. So I just want to remind you, this donor behavior is a response. If your donors are not taking an action or getting over an action line, I'll talk more about that in a minute. The way that you want them to, this is really what you should start thinking about. This is a response behavior.

12:22  
Okay, so let's think about this for your end of your giving campaign. And I'm going to explain this in a more holistic way. And then we're going to drill down into my top three tips. Okay. So in terms of your end of your giving campaign, your GivingTuesday campaign, here are just some examples of campaign goals that you might have to ensure success so that you ultimately meet your budget goals. Maybe you're you're measuring your open rates on your emails, or your click rates, or the number of donors that are coming in the amount of recurring donors and money, right, the total amount raised? Well, every single one of these goals relates directly to an action that you might take. Okay, so on the so on the right hand side, you can see a number of the different fundraiser actions that lead to those campaign goals. So increasing your email frequency. Yeah, did you know that increasing email frequency actually improves open and click rates, as long as the email quality is good, which will, which we'll talk about, but in increasing email content quality, right, that's the second one personalization, that's like, hello, first name, but then it creates the actual first name for the person social proof, demonstrating who has already given using peak moments, we're going to talk about that one specifically today and providing timely, warm, personalized, thank yous, right. So I could just tell you all these things and send you on your merry way and say, Okay, you guys include all this, and you're giving Tuesday and end of your campaign. But I'm not doing that. And why? Because the fact is, as I mentioned before, maybe 5% of you would do it, right. And why because in this sector, we're dealing with a massive fundraiser, motivation issue. And before you hang up, I do not mean motivation in the way it's we typically hear it talked about and no, I'm not about start talking about quiet quitting and all that. But I want you to hang on to your hats because there's a deeper way that motivation, issues show up in our sector, and I want to talk you through it because you actually can influence this in yourself. So every fundraising action, every fundraiser action needs to be adopted in conjunction with a habit designed with habit designed tools, okay? Because this is actually what gets us over the action line and brings that strategy from being something you leave in your door that you know, in your drawer that you talk about sometimes to something that you're actually doing on an every day basis. Okay, so for you to take any action, three things need to come together. This comes from the science of Dr. BJ Fogg, the BJ Fogg's behavior model, but three things need to come together motivation, ability, and a prompt. So ability is negatively impacted by things like actual time scarcity, although perception of not having enough time is actually a fear based motivational issue. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But things like data hygiene sometimes is an ability issue. Sometimes it's a motivation issue, like your data is actually good enough, but it's not perfect. So you experience some fear around that. And then different technology capabilities that allow you to do something, those all might fall into the ability lines. So I think about ability in terms of, you know, skill, ability, time, ability, and tech ability, but motivation is where it gets tricky. So in BJs, model, motivation is the relationship between hope and fear. So fear drives motivation down, and hope drives motivation up. And then we have to be able to get over the action line, thanks to a prompt, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. But the reason why I said, you know, I'm not going to talk about motivation, the way it's typically talked about, because I feel like when we talk about motivation in this sector, it's like, of course, we're motivated to fundraise for our organization, of course, we believe deeply in our work. And in our mission, of course, we feel like we have that intrinsic motivation. But what's important to understand is, that's actually different than the motivation around taking a specific action or doing a specific behavior, because the motivation related to that specific behavior is related to your hope and fear around that action, right, not around your organization's work or mission. And so we often try to motivate ourselves through these big macro level ideas or inspiration, when the reality is motivation in the way that it impacts our action needs to be examined and looked at in relation to that action. I hope that makes sense. So if you are afraid to get rejected from a major donor, it doesn't matter. If you try to motivate yourself around how important the work of the organization is, you have to be creating motivation, you have to be creating hope, around that very specific action and decreasing your fear around that very specific action. So let's just take one of those fundraiser actions that I had in the previous slides, personalization, right, so from so that's the like, first name thing that personalizes the email for the recipient. So I surveyed folks about this in my community the other day, right and 85% of folks are personalizing their emails, this has a big impact on open and click rates. But 15% 14% aren't doing it. And the reason that they're not doing it was not because of a tech issue, they have the same ability, as the people who are doing it, what was holding them back from doing it was fear of a mistake and inside the system, or that they're going to call someone you know, Charles, instead of Chuck, the things that naturally happen, because data is imperfect, there's too many data points and data shifts a lot too. And so that fear of the mistake was holding them back from getting over the action line. We think in our sector, that a lot of our problems are related to ability issues, but a lot of them are actually related to these motivational issues. So before we dive into my three tips, I wanted to give you one quick kind of brain hack around reducing fear and helping you get over that action line. So yesterday on the podcast, I released an episode with the psychologist Britt Frank. So Jonah who said, I think I went over this in therapy. Yes, I mean, everything that impacts how we show up how we behave, that's all related to who you are and how you show up as a fundraiser, right? We cannot disconnect those pieces from this work, especially because this work is deeply personal, deeply personal, right. And so we have to be aware of ourselves and our humaneness. And the way that those pieces impact ultimately how we show up as fundraisers. So one of the things that Britt talked about in the podcast episode, and there are a number of other episodes that have talked about this theme as well, is how one of the number one ways to keep ourselves stuck. And she wrote the book called The Science of stuck. The number one way to keep ourselves stuck is to gaslight, our own emotions. Just going to kind of say that again. The number one way to keep us stuck from not being able to take an action that we want to take is to gaslight our own emotions. So here's what this sounds like in fundraising. Oh, why are you still stressed about that? You know how to do blank. Why do you always do that? When you when you send an email? Why are you so uncomfortable right now this is totally normal. You're supposed to be able to do this. You shouldn't feel that way because of Of course, they're not going to respond immediately. Those are the ways we don't give ourselves space to feel our feelings. And there's one really, really quick way that can help reduce your fear and get you over the action line. And that's just to say to yourself, that makes sense. That makes sense that you feel that fear right now. Yeah, makes perfect sense that that's coming up, that is scary, that is vulnerable. When we acknowledge and validate our own emotions. It feels counterintuitive, like we've all been taught these like tough love strategies, you know, to sort of bully ourselves into taking the next right action. But the reality is, is that action and habits and behavior do not happen in that way. If we could have bullied ourselves into being great fundraisers, probably none of you would be on this call right now. Right? It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And it feels counterintuitive, but actually acknowledging and validating how we feel is one of the number one ways to reduce our fear to get over that action line. Okay, so we're going to write that down, put a post it on your wall, right, that makes sense. Give yourself the space to feel your feelings. It doesn't mean you don't take the action. We think if we give ourselves that space, oh, well, then maybe we won't do the thing. No, you actually will, you'll actually just see and acknowledge yourself. Yeah, that makes sense. You feel really scared right now. But you can do this, you can do hard things, right? Okay, now that I've been talking about all the brain stuff, and all the habits stuff, because I really want you guys to be able to walk away from this, understanding how you can do this for yourselves, right? I'm gonna give you these three high impact fundraiser behaviors. But I also want you to start to build a habit around designing your own behaviors too, right? So if you see with you or your team, that someone is not taking an action that you all said you wanted to take, right? We said we were going to do this thing, and we're not doing this thing. Okay, let's look at that what's happening? Have we made it really easy to do the thing is the action easy to do, right, that's how you play with that ability line. And then okay, we've made it super, super, super easy to do, we literally just have to write, you know, percentage first name percentage to personalize that, that email, it can't get easier than that. So if we're still not taking the action, then we need to look at motivation, what fear is coming up for us. And I'll also say, in addition to acknowledging and validating your own feelings, you need to acknowledge and validate each other's feelings, right giving space for fundraising teams to be able to talk about some of this discomfort to talk about how they feel when they experience rejection, to have community and support around that, you know, the connected fundraising community is also a really wonderful place to talk about some of this stuff. That is a really, really core human need. Okay? All right, you guys can take a sip of water, and then we're going to dive in to these behaviors.

22:48  
And you're going to notice in each of these, that I have actually applied habit and behavior design into how I'm talking about you implementing these in your work. Okay, so high impact action number one is to create a peak moment by engaging multiple senses. So this is from neons donor report as well. And it talks about this idea of the peak end rule. And this is something I learned about from Francesco Ambrogetti's book hooked on a feeling. And it talks about the way that when somebody gives, they have that burst of serotonin in their brain, right, there's the the happy hormones get released, it feels good. But most people actually don't remember when they gave how much they gave or who they gave to. And that's because that moment, that moment of serotonin release isn't converted into memory, which is dopamine. And so one of the ways to really improve your donor relationships and increase your revenue is to create dopamine experiences for your donors. And one of the ways that we do that is true peak moments, peak moments, create and cement memory. So one of the ways that we create more memory is giving multi sensory experiences, right, that multi sensory experiences enhance memory and recall. I don't know if any of you remember this or feel this way. But I can still smell in my brain, that first day of school classroom. Like there are some smells that are so deeply entrenched. And when I smell that, if I've, you know, walked my daughter into school, it brings back these waves of emotions, right and start to think about the way I would go to school a day before it started with my dad and make sure I knew how to walk from the lunch room to the my classroom and things like that. So those things multi sensory experiences really trigger our memory and recall.

24:49  
So there are five senses, right smell, sight, taste, sound, touch, and most nonprofits are really only using two of the five senses sound and sight and we used to Before the pandemic, and some folks are getting back into it, events were one of the ways that and one of the reasons why we had more powerful engagement of the five senses, right, there were more senses engaged in an event than what we experienced on in our virtual settings. But there are actually a number of different ways to create other multi sensory experiences. And this is something you should start to think about for your Giving Tuesday and end of your campaign right now. So here are some of my top tips for creating sensory experiences. So number one, remembering that a sensory experience can be done in groups or individually, you want to identify how you want the recipient to feel. So what memory of the organization, do you want the memory want the memory tied to? Right? What do you want them to think about when they're triggered, maybe by that center by that touch, and then tie the experience to your mission and your work. So some great things, I've seen our seed balls getting mailed out for environmental from environmental organizations, right, talking about the importance of propagating natural flowers, and what that does for bee populations, and then encouraging you to go out with your kids and throw the Seabolt seed balls in your front yard, right, or a recipe for a health related organization with spices that people can, can smell, and they're going to cook together, I watched a lot of cool virtual events around this too, with online cooking classes, right? That's a sensory experience, it doesn't actually have to be in person, but you're engaging touch and smell in that moment in relationship to your organization. Really, really powerful. And I really want to encourage you around this, to get creative and have fun, this doesn't have to be some big super expensive thing, you could find a really low cost and easy way to engage people in this even guiding people through a sensory experience on a virtual event, for example, like giving everyone a moment to sort of close their eyes and listen to the sounds around them, or you know, ground their feet into the ground. These are things that I do in my coaching, but really inspiring people and activating people to have a sensory experience, even if you're not in the same room as them. Because we always have access to these five senses, we're just not activating them. So this is a really untouched area, I think, for the nonprofit sector to double down on their impact and create these important peak moments. Okay, high impact action number two, I want to get through these because I do want to make sure there's time for questions at the end, I can see that things are going in the chat, but I'm trying to stay focused for you. And so I get you everything you need. So high impact action. Number two is include nurture emails in your communication strategy. So this goes for your GivingTuesday campaign, your end of your campaign, and also how you think about your communication year round. So what I realized the other day when I pulled my community around this, because I wasn't getting a lot of engagement around this concept of nurture emails. So I pulled the community around who knows what a nurture email is. And I was surprised to see the response. But actually, it makes perfect sense, because I'll be honest, as a fundraiser, I also did not know what a nurture email was. But once I left and became a consultant, and in the marketing world, we hear about nurture sequences so much more. So I just want to define this for folks who are like, I have no idea what she's talking about, because it does not matter. I'm gonna teach you everything that you need to know right now, this again, does not need to be a big list. So nurture campaigns are time based emails that are sent out to your audience in order to inform them, inform them of an offer, and overtime, motivate them to take some sort of action. And I would say in fundraising, I think of them as value based emails that help increase trust relationship connection. So when I'm helping clients with nurture emails, we have some that might still have a donate button in the footer, or the bottom of the email. But there are others that are purely relationship building, right? A welcome sequence sequence after someone joins your list or makes a donation is often a nurture sequence as well. So I hope that helps define that for all of you. So these are nurture sequences are so important, because this is what helps to build your relationship between you and the donor. Other great things to think about in terms of your nurture sequences are opportunities for your donors to participate and talk back to you. So whether that's filling out a survey or reply to this with giving folks an opportunity to engage and actually interact with you is really powerful. It's another big piece of what cements memory. And what I'll say is that even you might say, oh, Mallory, we tried to do a survey and only 10 People of our you know, 1000s and 1000s of people actually filled out the survey. That's actually okay, because the survey serves two purposes. The survey was Results gets you some really valuable answers from your community. But the invitation to fill out the survey really engages your community and understanding that they're an important part of the work, that they're an important part of what you're doing in the mission. And even being asked to participate in that feels good, right? How many of you guys have gotten, you know, done a tech support? And you get that email right after? Can you fill out the survey? Or are you on the call? They're like, Would you be willing to fill out the survey right when we're off this call? And I'm always like, nope. But the data suggests that even being asked to fill out a survey improves our relationship with the person inviting us to do so. So those are really impactful ways to improve your nurture emails. So you're probably like, okay, Mallory, this is cool. But how am I going to fit this into all of the other things that have to do with giving Tuesday and end of year and you know, who has time to write nurture emails? So let's talk about this from a behavior and habit design perspective, I'm gonna give you my top tips to write nurture emails. So number one, this just really helps sort of frame out the whole thing. You want to identify the core issues and problems that you address. So ask yourself, if people understood X, they would be more likely to do Y. And I think all of you have this answer about your organization. So let's say Y is invest in your organization, if people understood what they would be more likely to invest in your organization, if they understood what about the problem, if they understood what about your community, when you can answer that, you're going to start to realize the types of emails that you can send that make your donors your prospects more problem aware. So that's a really important first step, then you want to set a goal for each email. That's a call to action, a feeling and experience, right? What is the ultimate goal of each email. And look, you cannot always tie together at the very beginning, unless you're doing A/B testing, which I highly recommend. But if you're not doing A/B testing, right to see the impact that each nurture email has on the overall campaign, but you'll see at the end, add two nurture emails to your sequence. Look at what you did last year, at two or three, nurture emails, compare the results, look at the open rates, look at the click rates, look at the money coming in, right or a B test. So you can actually see in real time in a given year, how these things impact but make sure each email has a specific goal for that email, not for the overall campaign, because that's what's going to allow you to really hone down on creating that experience in the email content. Now, habit behavior, design time block for content creation, give yourself more time than you think you need, you think you need an hour to write a few nurture emails, give yourself three hours, when we start to worry, here's what happens. You give yourself an hour on your calendar, you're running 15 minutes late, because you're still working on that other task, and your brain tells you, you no longer have time to do the thing. Our brains are so tricky. So you need to give yourself a real abundance of time. And it's actually going to allow your brain to relax and sink in and actually be able to do this. I sent out an email the other week that said, unplug your internet. When you are writing content like this, you need to reduce distractions as much as possible. And you can say to yourself, Okay, I'm just going to have more discipline when it comes to opening my social media apps. But here's the deal, you guys, billions and billions and billions of dollars are being spent on making those little black boxes very addictive. So again, instead of bullying yourself around why you open Instagram, however, often make a bigger behavior change at the beginning to allow yourself the ability to have that break, right. So unplug your internet that'll stop you from going into your email, put your phone in another room, activities like that they get us over the action line, because we're motivated in that moment. We have the ability in that moment. And it's much easier to actually take a big action like that than to hold ourselves back from a little quick trip down social media lane, right. So time block, reduce distractions, that's going to help you be able to do this action. And then here's my last one, which is voice dictate or record and transcribe a conversation to get you started. So the blank page holds a lot of people back from getting over that action line. All right, click record on your phone and start talking about something if people understood X, they would be more likely to do Y. These are things that you are thinking about all the time and talking to each other about all the time. So just start to talk about it voice dictate it or find an old recording of your staff doing it, throw it into temi and get it transcribed. Let that type of more natural flow lead you to be able to create this content. Okay. The other thing I want to say, before we go is, when you start to do these things, you want to be prepared for those brain tricks, right? So you're going to start to write that email, and you're going to hear things like, oh, they don't want to hear this from us, or they don't want to hear from us this often. These are limiting beliefs, these are brain tricks that are holding you back from taking any level of risk, our lizard brain cannot tell tell the difference between whether or not we're going to be eaten by bear in the woods, or whether three people are going to unsubscribe from our list, okay, so you are getting ready to write that nurture email and your brains, like you're gonna get eaten by a bear in the woods. But you're not, you're not, you're totally safe, you can do this. And one of the ways to help you around this is to start preparing to hear those voices and to be like, Oh, there you are, like you told me, you'd be coming. Cool. I expected that. I'm gonna keep going, though, thank you very much for being here. Right. So the more we can start to anticipate and have expectations around some of that dialogue, and not internalize it as the truth, that means we should not take action, the better we are going to be getting over the action line. I have a lot of tips around this even particularly for increasing email content frequency with nurture emails, I don't worry if you cannot read this, if you scan this, I have opened a free community. It's called what the fundraising community. And if you go in, I'm going to be posting this and talking about this later today. So particularly talking about what are the different brain habits and tools that we can use to get ourselves over the action line. So you'll get all of this and more, there's the QR code. I just learned how to do that, you guys, I'm so proud of myself. So okay, that is high impact behavior. Number two. So high impact behavior. Number three, repurpose your content and schedule it in advance. Okay, so if you guys listen to what the fundraising you might have heard the interview with Woodrow Rosenbaum over Giving Tuesday, but here is the deal. donor fatigue is a myth. It's a total myth. Multi Channel messaging is really effective. Okay? If donors are tired of anything, they might be tired of bland content, or, you know, unpersonalized communication or blanket newsletters, but people are not tired of being generous. People are not tired of being generous. Okay, so what is multi channel messaging messaging, multi channel messaging involves providing personalized content to audience across different channels. So text messages, emails, push notifications, social media and web browsers. This is just an example from Susan G. Komen of how they are using multi channel messaging to really cement some of the same themes and ideas so that people are coming into contact with them in multiple spaces. So one of the things I thought was really interesting, when I just looked at them really quickly, look at that their website, one moment can change everything, then you look at their Instagram, and it's a quote, it's really about taking one moment at a time and trying to master those moments, they're talking about moments again, right? And then in that other Instagram post, or that was actually a Facebook ad. They're talking about almost every two minutes, right, another moment in time. So there's a lot of ways to think about multi channel messaging, both in terms of you know, repurposing some of that bigger content, but also what are the themes? What are the core issues? What are the core feelings that you want your organization to exhibit that you want people to feel in connection to your organization? And how can you repeat those themes over and over again. So here are some of my top tips for repurposing content. So bucket your content by core issues, problems that you address. So in terms of your content creation, so when we try to sit down, and we try to write five Instagram posts about all the different areas of our programs, or we're gonna write one post about this event, and then we're gonna write one post about this thing, we are context switching, right takes our brain a long time to wind up into the content of something. So when you're bucketing that time, like I talked about in the previous tip, I want you to think about how you can bucket that time by content area of the of the core issue that you address so that you can go really deep and you can be really effective and efficient with your time. Record the content first or use past recorded content. I shared this in the last tip as well, you guys, this is such a goldmine, like start to record your staff meetings, or ask a donor that you're really close with, if you can record you know, a virtual meeting with them. Use what you what you were saying on those calls, is it like those are the patterns that's the type of content that you want to be sharing through all of these different channels. And so save yourself some time save yourself some energy, help yourself, get oh, over that blank page demotivator and use past recorded content, transcribe it, right. And so you can use something like temi. Or there's lots of other tools like that it's very inexpensive to get things like that transcribed, and then first turn it into your longest written content. So if you have a blog, that would be a blog, it might be your email, if you don't have a blog, but your longest written content version, okay, so turn that recording that transcript into your longest written content version, and then pull pieces from that for social and email. And I for most, I do this in my own work and in my own business. And I would say, from every blog, I usually get two to five social media posts. And I usually get like two emails and five social media posts from every single blog that I write. So you just start to pull that out. And then you want to schedule your content in advance. Why? Because your brain is going to start to play tricks on you again, oh, we don't want to be repetitive. Yes, you do, by the way, oh, they just heard this from us, your brain is constantly going to make up excuses around why you shouldn't get over the action line. That's the fear on that motivation graph, right. So the way to make it really easy to do the action, really easy to do is to schedule that content before the moment that it's going to get live because the fear to go live, because the fear to schedule content is way less great than the fear to post content. And so scheduling everything in advance is a really important way to ensure that you are actually utilizing that repurposed content. And I believe this about campaigns too, I think we start to get in the middle of a campaign. And we're like, oh, like people didn't, you know, give as much that last email. So we shouldn't send Thursday's email anymore? No, like, it's important to be adaptive. And it's important to be iterative, and to listen to your people. But you have to have awareness around when it's fear, that's telling you not to do that thing, versus when it's actual strategy. And here, I'm just going to add this as a tip. Here's one way to know when something is fear versus intuition. Okay, because I get this question a lot. How do you tell the difference between fear and intuition? So fear comes in the form of binary, that's definitely a bad idea. They will hate it if we definitely don't want blank, black and white thinking, binary thinking, that's how fear talks to you. Intuition talks to you. In curiosity, what if blank, what might happen if I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable around blank, I wonder where that's coming from? That's intuition, right. And so I know that the feeling in your belly can be the same between fear and intuition. Notice the thought patterns in your head, because they are actually dramatically different. And what we typically hear in our head are those fear statements, it's a bad idea to do this right now. So and so it's gonna be mad at me, if I blank. If we do this, then this right, we get very binary, very black and white thinking. And it holds us back from taking the right action, the action, that's actually going to lead to the ROI that we were hoping for, that goes back to that piece around, we own that because of our limiting beliefs, we only realize a small percentage of our fundraising strategy. So schedule this content in advance, it is a way to design the habit to design the behavior to get you over the action line. So I want to just bring us back to the very beginning, the number one thing that impacts donor behavior is a prompt. The number one thing that impacts donor behavior is a prompt at the beginning, I told you that three things have to come together, in order for a donor to take an action, motivation, ability and a prompt. That means that no matter if the person is so incredibly motivated, if the action is so easy to do, but they are not prompted, people will not get over the action line. So when we say things like, well, they know we're a nonprofit, and we need money. So they would just give if they wanted to. Actually, that's not true. They will give when they are prompted to give and 95% of those prompts need to come from all of you, they need to come from fundraisers, accountants will do a little bit at the end of the year, their friends will do a little bit, but it's our job to be prompting our donors to be inviting them to give. And the number one things that thing that impacts your ability to prompt, are your beliefs. So if I leave you with anything, I really want you to start to bring some awareness into the thoughts and the beliefs that you're holding that are holding you back from being able to get your fundraising strategy through that resistance because you can do it. I told you at the beginning of this that I hated fundraising. And if I could shift this for me, anyone can shift this in them. So I also I told you, I was going to add one more tip at the end. I know I said I said I was gonna talk about three things. Now I'm giving you like seven tips, but I just couldn't help myself. So I want to talk about one other element of motivation and why that scheduling piece is also really important. So motivation looks a little bit like this, okay. And so a lot of times we say things like, oh, like we should be more motivated, like we need to what's the word I hear all the time discipline, we need to have more discipline around our our fundraising campaigns. Okay, guys, motivation wanes in the middle of anything. We have high motivation at the beginning, we have high motivation at the end. In the middle, there's something called a middle problem. Okay, this is totally normal. So this happens with campaigns, you launch really strong, and then you're really strong at the end of the campaign. And in the middle. It's a little bit like wah wah, right. Okay, so I want to give you some more tips around how to manage motivation. In the middle. This episode on with the fundraising with Dr. Ayelet Fishbach. She has studied the science of motivation, she talks about overcoming the middle problem around designing behaviors and milestones and things like that, throughout the middle of your campaign is going to be really helpful. And then using the habit and behavior design that we talked about at the beginning will also be really helpful doing that throughout the middle of your campaign is also incredibly helpful. All right, so here's the recap that we had the importance and limitations of donor insights, and really recognizing that fundraiser action leads to donor behavior, designing for your desired actions using behavior design, right? We cannot just talk ourselves into doing the things that we want to do if those things are scary, vulnerable things which fundraising is, so you need to design for those behaviors, you need to practice those behaviors. Oops, the three high impact fundraising behaviors that we talked about, and then designing for motivation through the middle problem, go check out that episode with Ayelet Fishbach. She has an amazing book, as well called Get it done, where she talks about the middle problem a lot as well. I think those will be helpful to help you sustain all of this throughout your entire campaign as well. I've mentioned a few times on on this webinar that I opened recently a free community. So what the fundraising community if you snap that QR code before, or you can go to what the fundraising community.com, it's totally free. We have over 200 fundraisers and they're already amazing, amazing, folks. And we are doling out a lot of other additional tips and tools and things for giving Tuesday and end of year. So here are the other ways to find me and connect with me if you are interested. But let's make sure that we have some time for questions.

47:27  
Fantastic. Once again, Mallory.

So what I did I need the bar. Did you meet

the bar, folks? Did she meet the bar? Let's see it in the comments. There is a question about the deck. Can you share the deck? We have the folder for it, just get it over to me and I'll take it off. Amy, it's going in the folder? Don't worry. We do have a few questions. And then our next speaker is in the green room. So very excited for Katie to join us. All right, so got a few ones Kim asked something. You're so far over the bar, we lost it. Okay. That's that's Abby on our team with the hits. Okay, want to get some questions in here? I'm interested in how organizations are moving from output measures to outcome and impact measures? Hmm,

48:24  
we'd say the first part of that question. Again,

48:26  
I'm interested in how organizations are moving from output measures to outcome and impact measures. And this is Kim, who's actually interviewed on the exchange stage about data. So like, kudos, Kim.

48:43  
So Kim, I'm not sure. exactly the sort of perspective through which you're viewing this question. But what I would say is that I actually think output measures are in are really important, because outcome measures, I mean, they need to be tied together, right? So when people say something like our donor retention number went down this year. Okay, that's an interesting outcome measure. And I want to look at it in comparison to the output measure. So how many emails did you send this year compared to last year? Right? I've heard a lot of sort of scary stories about people fundraising less after they got PPP loans, right. And so we can't really look at those things disconnected in terms of fundraiser action, like when we talk about habit and behavior design on the model. In order to cement a habit in order to cement the behavior, we need to be able to show shine and celebrate that behavior. And the outcome is to disconnected from that. So let's say that you feel really scared sending out personalized emails to your whole list. You want to be able to show shine to do that celebration. Every time you click Send on that email every time you walk into that scary donor meeting. And so I don't know it went Focus shifting from, you know, outputs to outcomes, if that's a way perhaps in some cases to micromanage fundraisers less, which of course, I don't want fundraisers to be super micromanage. But what we have to shift there's this other cultural understanding around fundraiser celebration and support and that we really should be looking at those outfits, but we should be doing it in a really supportive, motivating community driven way.

50:28  
Love it. Love it. Folks, we have time for a few more questions before we bring Katie to the main stage. Vernet. What was the third high impact behavior?

50:41  
The third high impact behavior is around repurposing content. Yeah. Yeah. And that look, that's high impact, because it's a way to be efficient effect, like, and it's an effective fundraising strategy. So it's a high impact behavior. Because in the strategies that I gave you around repurposing, we're talking about efficiency around your own time, right, really guarding your own time and making the most of it, because we all don't have enough time to do the amount of things we're trying to do. But it's also really effective, because donors need to see that multi channel messaging, they need to see the recurrence of similar types of content and themes across different modalities.

51:21  
Here's, here's a tactical one. But it's a good one. Do newsletters count as nurture emails? Usually, there's some action to take besides a donate button at the bottom. Oh, I see. Ah sorry, Carolyn.

51:35  
You know what, here's here's why they don't, because they are not personalized. Do

51:41  
you mind it? Can I take us up so people could see Yeah, a little bit more? Oh, yeah.

51:49  
Yeah, so they do not count as a nurture email, in my opinion, because they are, first of all, they're not personalized in a way where you're sort of talking directly to the recipient of that email. There's often so many different calls to action. Remember how I said you want to have one goal and sort of one focus of each nurture email newsletters have way too much inside there to really drive towards a particular goal or a particular feeling. And so when I think about nurture emails, and this advice came out on the podcast recently to, you know, someone was like, I would take every newsletter email, and chop it up into a bunch of different nurture emails, like, it's better actually to send five emails at each of those things than the one newsletter email with everything inside of it. And to really ensure that when you're sending that content out, you're doing it in a really personalized human way. This is another reason I really recommend voice dictation because nurturer emails also sound like how we talk, they sound more conversational, they sound more casual. And you can find lots of examples online too. And if you jump into the community, I'll post some later today as well. But but that's the real difference. A newsletter feels very like one way, right? Here's all the information about us. And so even if you have a survey as your third thing down in the newsletter, email, that doesn't make it a nurture email. So really good question. I'm super glad you asked that.

53:15  
Want to make sure we have tiny bit of tech check for the transition, but Jennifer O'Neill and I'm going to put this up because she is the MVP of GX so far, folks. Gotta say, what's the number one way you can make donors make one make your donors at multiple levels feel appreciated? And like what a great question for Mallory. So we'll end on this this last question.

53:37  
I mean, I think there's a few things here like one is warmth and personalized appreciation. So that phone call and if you need to do something like use a tech tool that's direct to voicemail or something to help you get over the action line around your thank you calls, then you should be looking into that but warm, personalized thank yous, doing those in different types of way. I mean, you can even do voice memos or little videos, there's so many different ways, but the the moment people feel people feel a sense of belonging when they feel seen and included. And so demonstrating appreciation in that way is really important. The other thing that I'll say is that you have to feel appreciative of them to exhibit genuine appreciation that they're going to feel. So if you don't take that moment before your phone call and actually sink into your own feelings around your gratitude for their participation in your work. It's not going to actually transfer in that way. So when we're taking making those really quick thank you calls, we're scribbling out something and people can feel like like energy attracts like energy, our energy is always transferring. And so it's really important that you sink into your gratitude as you're taking those actions, that's going to make them a lot more effective too.

54:56  
Fantastic Mallory, as expected,

54:59  
thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm so grateful for this community.

55:02  
Don't forget there is session feedback embedded right in the platform. One little quirk and I did this testing. If you want to send multiple versions of that, you just got to navigate away and go back to an old refresh. But we got it covered, mic drop. Next generation next level direction. I mean, thank you so much for for joining us. Mallory. What a fantastic session, as I expected.

55:30  
Thank you for having me. Thank you fundraisers for the work that you're doing. It is so important, it is so important. The movement of money into the sector into your programs is so important. I'm so honored to get to work with you. And Tim, thank you so much for having me and for all of your support of creating a healthier fundraising ecosystem. I'm so grateful.

55:49  
Thank you. I know this will not be the last time Mallory and I are talking or you'll see Mallory. We are a proud sponsor of what the fundraising podcast as well. And yes, we're recording all of this. So there you go. Thank you, Mallory. We're going to cycle off. Angela is going to be joining for just like a minute as I introduce Katie murch our next speaker Thank you, Mallory. We'll see you off. Now. I'm going to I'm going to kick you out.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai